Floating Monitors - Uber Office Setup

With a fleet of 18 shield apocs, 6 basis, and 1 drake I have begun to clear the 40 man Nation's Rebirth Facility and True Power Provisional Headquarters sites with regularity. Random DC's on single clients and the occasional game freeze have been the biggest hurdle, but I have been impressed with the stability of the EVE client compared to how it was in the past. I did lose half a fleet when Grams gave me a hotpocket that had been nuked for 4 minutes instead of 2 because that's how long she heats up her TV dinners and she gets confused sometimes and accidentally gives me 2nd degree burns. But I put the fear of God in her when I threatened to call child protective services and also took some pictures of my swollen tongue and super glued them to the microwave to serve as a constant reminder.

I'm Back... and Bigger Than Ever!

Grams quit smoking and now I have more of her social security to spend on gaming. I recently shelled out $1,010 for 26 3-month EVE subscriptions (with the buddy program there was another 1.75 months free) and will be returning to EVE with a vengeance. Expect to see some good synergy in the new Zzek Fleet as the 26 pilots are being custom incubated for maximum performance using 4 different builds. In a few months I will be running incursions solo or failing horribly. My hard earned money is literally on the former. No chopsticks or wooden dowels required now. GM approved software key and mouse broadcasting will allow me to simultaneously control the group of 18 DPS ships or the group of 6 Logistics ships while the 2 fleet boosters just do what they do best. I might need a 27th passive uber tank but with 2 ships on each of the 12 side monitors and 1 ship each on 2 of my center monitors I still have 1 extra monitor if I need it.

Got bored with EVE Online; Now Playing Nodiatis with a new rig!

EVE was a lot of fun while it lasted. After your bajillionth solo level 5 mission you get kinda bored. PvP in EVE is endless tedium occasionally interrupted by incredible rushes. I had a few small gang victories and some t3 kills but most encounters were tiny ships that zip away, gigantic BS/HAC gang obliterations, or supercarrier/dread hot drops. I'm currently multiboxing 15 Nodiatis accounts under some pseudonyms. Building the ideal group has been a challenge as I go through the many skills available, Nodiatis is surprisingly complex.

Here is the latest office addition, I'm in the process of replacing all computers with one behemoth stack:

Here is the new 15 monitorflotilla:

As you can see the monitors are floating roughly 4 inches above the desk surface which is completely unobstructed. The monitors are actually suspended from clear mono-filament which runs through tiny holes in the ceiling where it connects to beams in the crawlspace.

The entire monitor array weighs in at about 200lbs and each column of 3 monitors is suspended by its own 4 lines of 80lb mono. The line is connected to a swivel which connects to a turnbuckle bolted inside a conduit pipe that allows for minute adjustments in elevation. And of course there is a mess of power and DVI cables hidden behind there resembling something you'd see on a borg spaceship.

The only monitor column to actually make contact with the wall is the center one and does so only for alignment purposes. The weight of the wires pulling off in one direction initially made aligning the monitors a nightmare. The final alignment is near perfect but required days of fine tuning and adjustment.

There are 8 powerful PC's that run the array. Using Synergy I am able to move my mouse cursor from one screen to another with a single mouse and the keyboard works on whichever screen currently has the cursor on it. A modification to Synergy allows me to broadcast the exact keystrokes or mouse movements to all or some of the monitors at once for synchronized actions. Watching a mouse cursor dance identically on 15 monitors at once is a cool sight but is also essential in cutting down on time spent doing mundane actions like synching options menus and the like. Onscreen I am logging on to Nodiatis on my 15 accounts below.

...and no the mouse doesn't work on the glass desk. The ugly pad was removed for pictures.

The damage:
3 monitors were cracked during shipping (UPS) and had to be RMA'ed with Newegg - they just ship them in the monitor box which is grossly inadequate and always arrives with box damage.
1 monitor had a pixel color defect and had to be RMA'ed via the manufacturer - not a single other dead pixel or issue with the Samsung P2250's.

1 monitor broken due to a mistake during installation.

3 monitors trashed in a fit of nerdrage after a silicon test had ugly results.